Frustrated - thinking of learning another CMS
Ok so i have been researching and experimenting with drupal for a year now. To be honest I have made very little progress :-(
I'm starting to re-evaluate if i'm learning the right CMS. Originally I liked learning drupal because it's way more flexible than Wordpress, but now i'm realizing i might need something in between wordpress and drupal in terms of ease of use. I dont really know any php at all, but i think more of my confusion comes from the basic concepts of drupal like taxonomy and CCK.
I'm trying to develop a variety of sites, ranging from music community with audio uploads to more basic databases that revolve around user generated review processes. I know there are drupal modules that accomplish everything I need for basically any site I can dream up at this point in time, however the process i'm taking to get there seems to be never ending. I know the community here is great and the development is quite active. It's just that i'm frustrated and want to give up.
Should I look into other programs like Postnuke? I once tried out a Joomla install and defintely didnt like it.
getting into drupal
Ya it can be frustrating getting into the model.
The general breakdown is
CCK - your content types, these are the "things" on your site (the word node is a generic term of any content item )
Taxonomy - these are the categories that you put your content types into - like key words or genres
Views - lets you have a collection of "nodes" based on the charateristics of the node
The tough part about building a drupal site is getting it to look right. Learning how to theme your data types is a good first step, also check out the lullabot webcasts, and the drupal dojo group for examples.
http://drupal.org/node/73694 - Using taxonomy to organize content
http://www.lullabot.com/
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo
Hope that helps a bit. As for switching to a different CMS, I'm not sure what other choices there are....
Good luck!
Check out
Check out http://www.opensourcecms.com/ and http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ . They might be able to help you to choose a CMS.
It might be worth your time to learn some PHP, if possible. If you really want to pursue web design, a bit of programming experience could go a long way.
Should I look into other
That would be a step in the wrong direction. I think you should stay with Drupal and work your way through the jungle. Overall I think Drupal is not that hard to configure and as you already mentioned it is more feature rich than other CMS. The only thing I absolutely hate is the sloppyness of module programming (probably aided by the database abstraction layers). Many modules cause an enormous amount of MySQL queries.
On the other hand, it really helped in the past years to get new modules out. Development of Drupal has accelerated unbelievably.
Well, if I were you, I would defenitely stick with Drupal. You won't find a lot of CMS that can compete and even if some might be smaller to set up, you will eventually hit a wall when you cannot get the functionality implemented you want.
Alternatively you could try to hire one of the Drupal experts that float around in the forums.
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
mrtunes,
Your frustration is understandable. Do you think it's easy for everybody else? I dont think so.
Building the website that you want it's a difficult job. If you see good site around internet, dont forget that most of them are not one-man job. You have to know programming, be a good designer etc etc.
Switching to another cms ?? It depends on what are your goals. If you want to be a web developer than stick with drupal, spend time on learning some php and I'm sure it will pay off at the end (again, it will take some time). If that's not the case, if you want to create some simple web site, then drupal it's not the best choice. After all, I really see drupal as an good platform for *developers*.
I hope this helps,
simul
After all, I really see
Not necessarily. Unless you start customizing things to your liking, you don't need to know php. And if you do start customizing, well then any other framework like php requires php as well. I have started with Drupal a couple of years ago and I didn't know any php. I have made my first sites without knowing php (the only thing that drove me nuts was theming and finally I learned php) but if you can use any of the provided themes, well then you don't even need to know php, css or anything else.
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
have patience
I sympathize with you, but it does take time. And realistically 1 year is not terribly long for learning web development, especially if this is not your full-time job. I'm a full-time engineer and over the last year I've been setting up my alma-mater with a drupal website in my spare time; and it has taken the whole year before I worked out all the major kinks, etc.
A few quick tips (from my own experience):
Good luck.
And realistically 1 year is
I couldn't disagree more. This stuff should be doable in a much shorter time, unless he has too many requirements. If he does, he is probably better off just hiring someone to do his development.
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Maybe textpattern?
Hi,
I am new to Drupal... but as a suggestion for another CMS, check out Textpattern. Very nice CMS. It is on the OpenSourceCMS site, but under the blog category (not sure why... I think of it more as a CMS.)
It takes a little bit of dinking to get used to the text-pattern-specific syntax... but worth the learning curve. So easy to use after that initial introduction.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Micky
Make a commitment
Drupal is not for casual dating. Drupal is for marrying . If you have not been bitten by the bug in a year, you're not gonna be. Move on. I fell in love with this script and hated it all in the same day. I feel both ways about it every day I use it, which is every day.
Just kill yourself -- j/k --- lolol
http://profitlabinc.com
thanks for the replies
thanks for the replies everyone. i have considered learning php but i also hear a lot of talk about ruby on rails and think is it worth learning php? well i know a lot of php knowledge translates over to ruby but still to spend all that time on one language is quite a commitment. i guess one thing is constant - drupal was built on php and it will stay that way as long as it's around i gather.
as for the comments about hiring a coder. that's why i think many of us are on these forums in the first place. often it's not feasible to hire a coder especially if you have many concepts for websites in your head you could spend all your money on just hiring coders. i also think that's why many of us look at CMS systems in the first place - we're ok with tinkering a bit of code here and there but scared to try building a site from the ground up.
i also learned about Expression Engine and see that it has a lot of beautifully designed sites behind it. i know though that it's not as flexible as drupal in the long run. probably good for single-portfolio styled sites.
Learning PHP
Unless you leave the web development world, learning PHP is going to help you out in a big way for a long time. As for Ruby, I think it's probably safe to say that most of the Ruby on Rails programmers out there also know PHP. Plus (and it sounds to me like you haven't learned a programming language before--sorry if that's a false assumption), if you learn one language then it will take you a fraction of the time to learn a second language as it took for the first one. The concepts that you encounter when learning your first language will largely carry over to any other. In other words, if you learn PHP, you really aren't spending "all that time on one language". It's more like you're spending a lot of time learning to program in general, and a little bit of time learning PHP's specific way of doing the things that all languages do.
You might appreciate this index of programming language usage to see that PHP is widely used enough to be worth your while to know: http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm . It's worth noting that the syntax of PHP is somewhat similar to that of the other of the top 4 languages in that index (which is probably one of the reasons why PHP is so popular).
as for the comments about
Well, then maybe you have too many expectations. If you cannot do it yourself, you either need to learn how to do it, hire someone or do something less complex. I don't think another CMS will make it any easier for you to achieve those goals. Drupal is one of the easiest to configure to your needs.
Here is a suggestion: Why don't you try out a few other CMS and we see you back in a month or so?
I started out very small and since I do most of my development in the little free time I have, I have many things left to be desired. I have always a huge list of improvements that I wish I could have worked on 6 months ago. I too cannot afford a developer, so I can only lower my expectations to the point where I can manage them. If you can't get what you want out of the box, try to rethink your approach. Maybe with a slight change in concept it is possible with currently supported modules to create what you want.
Andre
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
i did check out some others
Andre, this weekend i checked out some other CMSs, as mentioned above i looked at Expression Engine and then i looked at ModX. oh and thanks mickey i'll look at textpattern too. some nice sites in the txpmagazine!
It really appears as if Drupal is THE choice for building larger community sites these days short of writing your own CMS from scratch. I will be patient and take things in small steps, so i think this thread has been helpful.
I just figured out the basics of the View module and now i'm going to dig into the CCK which seems like it's own program in itself more than it is merely a module.
Agreed
I agree (somewhat) and I am glad you found what you are looking for. However consider your steps very carefully. Changing CMS a few years down the road (when you hit the wall if another CMS) and keeping the complete URL structure (so the search bots won't hit 404 instead of your spiderfood) will be quite painful (not that it can't be done).
Making a decision on which CMS is perfect for you is not easy. If you are having that much problems after a year, you are probably doing the right thing. For everyone else, I would recommend to invest the time upfront and have something that you can build upon in the future. I am at a point where I actually try to do everything with Drupal since I am so used to it (may not be a good thing either).
The reason I suggested to hire someone is to get you off the ground faster. It doesn't have to be a lot of money. Just ask around how much it would cost to build a site to your specification.
Initially I did a lot of custom work on "my" Drupal, but now I try not to do this anymore. I do whatever I can on the theme (and many things I like can actually be done there) but I try not to touch the core modules or even contrib. modules anymore. I saw the flaw in this approach when I did the upgrade from 4.6 to 4.7. It was a nightmare, because I had done too much customization. Fortunately 4.7 implemented a lot of things I had "customized". Now my sites are almost pure Drupal with a few modules but only very little custom stuff, just so I can upgrade whenever I need to.
Also I think it is important to realize that you will NEVER have THE perfect site. As I mentioned before, I would like to implement so many things that I haven't had time to do yet. It is important to get started and then improve the site. It also gives your community a good feeling to realize someone is working on improving the site. I could still work out the finer details of some of my websites, but I threw them online at some point and some get a lot of traffic and visitors that I would have missed otherwise. If you built a site to make revenue, consider spending all of it (and more) to get the features out you like. Your users will thank you and your site will grow much faster.
What I am trying to say: Just get it out there, even if it isn't perfect yet. Then learn as you go.
Good luck with your sites !
Andre
P.S.: Off the top of my head I can tell you 10 things for each of my sites that I want to improve or redo. That doesn't stop people from visiting and even complimenting on the sites.
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
interesting comments andre.
interesting comments andre. i will actually post here to see roughly how much my concept would cost for core modules to be setup. i guess it's worth a shot to at least see.